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SD-WAN? Let's talk

I am sure at this point, you all have caught up on with this SD-WAN craze.  Some early vendors are now bought by industry giants.  Some have really cool cloud provisioning and management dashboards. Some claims that your edge has never been this simple to set up before.

However, there are still a few concerns I have:

  • VPN technology is a mature one by now.  There are vendors out there who can offload IPsec tasks and processes onto a hardware based processor.   Would these new "SD-WAN" providers give me the same throughput/granularity? How scalable is the solution?

  • Applications - There are vendors out there who did WAN Optimization for living and have a very rich application signature database.  What about the pure play vendors?

  • Same goes for routing.  can you handle complex routing? can you offload or optimize those touting decisions?

  • What if I already have that infrastructure (VPN/Routing) in place? would your solution be a tunnel in tunnel? What would happen to my application performance?

  • And more importantly, what about security? what happens to my security posture when I re-architect my WAN edge?
I am sure there is more to this and I would love to hear them.




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